Amsterdam University Press Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe: 7 (Gendering the Late Medieval and Early Modern World)

Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe examines the lives of women whose gender impeded the exercise of their personal, political, and religious agency, with an emphasis on the conflict that occurred when they crossed the edges society placed on their gender. Many of the women featured in this collection have only been afforded cursory scholarly focus, or the focus has been isolated to a specific, (in)famous event. This collection redresses this imbalance by providing comprehensive discussions of the women’s lives, placing the matter that makes them known to history within the context of their entire life. Focusing on women from different backgrounds -- such as Marie Meurdrac, the French chemist; Anna Trapnel, the Fifth Monarchist and prophetess; and Cecilia of Sweden, princess, margravine, countess, and regent -- this collection brings together a wide range of scholars from a variety of disciplines to bring attention to these previously overlooked women. Review These two editions bring us one step closer to making women and their legacies part of the center, rather than the edge. As Dowd reminds us, early modern women's history and literature is still seen as marginal by the academy itself (262). This relegation to the margin can only be remedied if early modernists start embracing women, their histories, and their texts as integral parts of early modern studies. The essays in these two editions encourage their readers to do just that. - Lotte Fikkers, Leiden University, Journal of Early Modern History 25 (2021). Joint review with Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, ed., Amsterdam University Press, 2018 This collection of essays provides particular insights into women living on a variety of margins and their attempts to construct mechanisms to cope and prosper, to survive, or at least give their deaths alternative meaning. The essays encourage readers to consider the challenges the women present to more established modes of understanding the past and its relationship to the present. - Jessica L. Malay, University of Huddersfield, English Historical Review 135 (December 2020) "In Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe, Lisa Hopkins and Aidan Norrie present a series of essays that begin to break up the parched soil of long-neglected early modern 'women on the edge' to make way for future scholars to plow, plant, and grow new research. ... The anthology makes a strong case for continued primary-source research into secondary and tertiary women of the early modern period who have previously been eclipsed by women holding primary roles in society as well as men who played both central and secondary roles. It also makes a case for more expansive coverage of women and their influence in even superficial treatments of the period. The soil has been turned, and the field, it turns out, has the potential to yield excellent fruit. - Britt Eyre-Mitchell, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20.3 (Summer 2020) Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe ... challenges readers to focus their attention on women who occupy material and ideological spaces defined as 'the edge' ... Spanning two and a half centuries (ca. 1457-ca. 1701), this collection attends to women who have been little studied or who have been studied primarily for one, narrow '(in)famous event' (17). Such critical approaches that intentionally look away from the 'center' of early modern European cultures ... are an energizing way to recover and analyze early modern women's intersectional experiences. ... Undeniably wide-reaching, this collection ... will be of interest and particular use to interdisciplinary early modern scholars of gender, European history, politics, the English Interregnum, monarchy, and literature. - Elisa Oh, Howard University, Early Modern Women 14.2 (Spring 2020) From the Inside Flap Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe examines the lives of women whose gender impeded the